Comment by rms
17 years ago
If anyone wants to read his tech policy, here it is. This election is a battle for net neutrality.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/
The education policy is also good, it basically comes down to "spend more money on education."
If throwing money at problems worked well, startups would be screwed.
If education could be solved by the government it would be well worth eliminating many potential startups in the education space. It would make more opportunities for startups, because everyone would be more educated, producing more wealth to spend.
Is there even a positive correlation between throwing more money at education and having better-educated kids? It looks like at some point over the last thirty years, we got to the point that the administrative cost of distributing the next dollar for education exceeds one dollar, so the extra money gets soaked up by bureaucratic inefficiencies.
But whatever! It's only billions and billions of taxpayer dollars spent by a monopolist that buys its product from a cartel! Clearly, the important thing is to give more money to this completely deranged system, rather than fixing it.
I've never understood this mindset. Don't conservative types like you believe in market influences? How could spending more money NOT improve education levels?
Just a couple of examples off the top of my head: 1) Spending more means higher teacher salaries. Higher salaries attract better talent, which means better education. 2) Spending more means better facilities and supplies. Decent materials and supplies lead to a better classroom experience.
I went to a dirt-poor high school in south Georgia. My chem teacher was senile, our textbooks were 14 years old and falling apart, and the sinks leaked chemicals onto the floor. I know this is anecdotal evidence, but more money would have helped my school a TON.
This whole "bureaucratic inefficiency" argument it a catch-all that greedy rich people like to use as an excuse to not help out the less-fortunate.
"Don't conservative types like you believe in market influences? How could spending more money NOT improve education levels?"
It's insulated from the actual market. Government schools are a de facto monopoly, since they sell their product below cost, and you have to pay for it even if you don't use it. They also use a teacher's cartel to supply their teachers, and this cartel pays a lot of money to lobbyists who craft our education policy. Given these layers of monopolies, cartels, and corruption, your reference to 'market influences' makes little sense.
"1) Spending more means higher teacher salaries. Higher salaries attract better talent, which means better education"
I'd rather figure out how to fire the bad teachers rather than hiring new ones. Imagine how much money we could spend on new teachers if we shut down the rubber room: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/education/10education.html...
"Decent materials and supplies lead to a better classroom experience."
Oh. Does this mean "I looked at what kind of school supplies people used fifty years ago, and concluded..." or "I imagine..."?
"This whole "bureaucratic inefficiency" argument it a catch-all that greedy rich people like to use as an excuse to not help out the less-fortunate."
Or this whole "spending other people's money on a system that has only gotten more pathologically ineffective as billions of dollars of other people's money has been spent on it" argument is just a way for people to feel good about themselves without facing reality. Or maybe it's pointless to attribute someone else's argument to their biases, especially when you can't disprove the argument!
I think we should accept that school is not for everyone. I think we should get people out of school when they can contribute more to society by working rather than disrupting classrooms. It's a travesty that so many otherwise useful 14-year-olds are earning their straight-D report cards for years (and spending my money to do it!) when they could be mopping floors, flipping burgers, etc. I would have been happier working full-time when I was thirteen, instead of going to school and only getting to work evenings and weekends. Surely I'm not the only one.
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Right, let's reduce education! Ignore the order of magnitude more funding provided to the Department of Defense.
This never made any sense to me. I target my voting like I optimize my code. Look for the biggest inefficiencies and start there.
I don't see why that's relevant. I was responding to the argument that, contrary to the last few decades of high school spending for poorer performance, we might want to consider lowering spending. Unless there is some kind of treadmill of escalating dumbness, and we have to keep spending more and more on schools to break even.
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